The invention is related to a type of cast net for use in fishing, in particular, to a kind of planar type cast net, which is simpler and more conventient to manufacture.
The cast net is one kind of traditional fishing devices but its utilization is not familiar to the average person. However, we can see, in movies or on television, fishermen throwing a cast net on the water to spread over the fish and catching them by gradually hauling up the drawing rope fastened at the center of the cast net. For certuries, the construction and manufacturing methods of cast-nets have changed very little. In order to facilitate review and comprehension, the old style cast-net construction with reference to enclosed figures is described as follows:
Firstly as shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, the conventional cast-net is of a conical construction i.e. narrower at the top and very wide at the bottom to cover a large area of water. Therefore, the lower part of the cast-net consists quite a few pieces of net of different lengths joined together. As shown in FIG. 2, the smaller sized cast-net is constructed of three net elements A, B and C where A is the shortest and is located at the top, B is in the middle and C, the longest portion, is at the bottom. The three net elements A, B, C, must be manually stitched together in a manner so that their side edges (A1 and A2, B1 and B2, C1 and C2) are correspondingly stitched into three cylindrical net rings of different inner diameters. Then, the bottom edge A4 of net element A and the top edge B3 of net element B are correspondingly stitched together. The bottom edge B4 of net element B is stitched together with the top edge C3 of net element C.
This amount of manual stitching consumes a great deal of time and man power. Furthermore, faulty joining of the different lengths (A4 B3, and B4 C3) may result in overlapping and wrinkles which may adversely affect the spread of the cast-net.
Secondly, the top edge A3 of the conventional cast-net is fastened on a fixing ring (12) by a rope (11). Because the top edge A3 has numerous tiny meshes, it takes many man hours to fasten the individual meshes to the fixing ring (12) by the rope and in some cases where the rope (11) fails to get through correctly and only partly fastens the top edge A3 of the element, it is liable to loosen and fall apart due to the large forces which occur during the use of the cast-net and therefore quality of the net would be greatly impaired.
The inventor has found that with present labor costs and difficulty in finding adequate labor, the conventional cast-net construction is a high cost product which is not competitive in world markets. Therefore, the present invention provides a cast-net for fishing which is easier to manufacture, thus saving in manpower requirements, and upgrading the quality of the nets.